On 09/23/2015 10:21 AM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
On Sep 23, 2015, at 9:25 AM, Noel Chiappa <j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
From: Toby Thain
It did exist for some exotic, word addressed architectures
{Innocent look}
You mean, like the PDP-10?
{Ducks!}
Noel
Strangest C I saw was on a DPS-8 mainframe running GCOS-8.
Zane
Well, there are plenty of word-but-not-byte/character addressable
machines out there, which makes life interesting for the likes of C.
FORTRAN (at least FORTRAN IV) never had any problems with that, as the
CHARACTER datatype didn't yet exist in the language, but for the
occasional vendor "extension". Later versions of FORTRAN/Fortran, of
course did.
The CDC 6000 series for example. Ones complement, 60-bit
word-addressable system used well into the 1980s, as opposed to
bit-addressable CDC machines like the STAR. Interestingly COBOL on the
6000 easily outran most COBOL implementations on
byte/character-addressable machines.
One thing that I've wondered about is "does the current HLL-du-juor
dictate processor architecture?"--and not the reverse. Does anyone
consider a machine that doesn't implement any sort of hardware stack,
for example, a marketplace contender?
--Chuck
